Introduction
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was born in Saint-Malo in 1709 and died in Potsdam in 1751. During his youth, he studied medicine in Paris, Reims, and Leiden with the famous in these respects Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738).
Even though he was one of the main figures of Enlightenment, particularly in the field of medicine, his provocative opinions on morality elicited criticism from many of the movement’s most prominent representatives.
While his works have been insufficiently studied for a long time, they have met with greater approval in recent years. The reason is a growing interest in materialism, clandestine literature, and the “radical” stances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Israel 2001; Jacot Grapa 2019; Paschoud and Pépin 2017).
Between Medicine and Philosophy
In La Description du corps humain(1648), Descartes proposed that there is no reason to attribute bodily movement to the soul, stating that it occurs as a result of material reasons that can be...
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References
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Ratto, A. (2023). La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6519-1_897
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